How to Add a Live Scoreboard Overlay to OBS (Step by Step)

What you need

A scoreboard overlay is a transparent web page that OBS layers on top of your camera feed. Because it is a browser source, the score updates live during the stream without you touching OBS at all — you change the score from your phone and the overlay follows.

You need three things: OBS Studio (or Streamlabs, vMix, or anything that supports browser sources), a scoreboard service that produces a transparent overlay URL, and a phone to control the score. This guide uses Score Cast’s free overlay, but the steps are the same for any browser-source overlay.

Step 1 — Create your game and get the overlay link

In Score Cast, create a game, pick your sport and enter the team names and colours. Every game gets a short room code, and each room exposes an overlay URL in the form score-cast.net/overlay/YOURCODE. Copy that link.

Pick the overlay style before you go live — there are eight, from an ESPN-style ticker across the bottom to a minimal corner badge. The style is part of the overlay page, so OBS never needs reconfiguring when you change it.

Step 2 — Add a browser source in OBS

In OBS, select your scene, then:

• Click + under Sources and choose Browser.
• Name it (e.g. "Scoreboard") and click OK.
• Paste the overlay URL into the URL field.
• Set Width and Height to your canvas size — usually 1920 × 1080.
• Leave "Custom CSS" empty and click OK.

Step 3 — Position it and go live

The overlay background is transparent, so only the scoreboard graphic shows. Drag it into position if the style needs it (ticker styles are already laid out full-width). That is the whole setup — from here, score the game from your phone and the overlay updates in real time.

One tip for multi-camera or multi-scene setups: add the same browser source to every scene using "Add Existing" rather than creating a new one each time. OBS then keeps a single connection to the overlay, which saves resources and keeps every scene perfectly in sync.

Troubleshooting

Overlay shows a black background: make sure you used the overlay URL, not the display URL — the display page is designed for TVs and has a solid background, while the overlay page is transparent.

Score not updating: browser sources are paused by OBS when a scene is inactive if "Shutdown source when not visible" is ticked. Untick it so the score keeps flowing in every scene.

Blurry text: set the browser source resolution to match your canvas exactly rather than scaling a small source up.

Related scoreboards